On the Church and the State (First Hour), Anderson Cooper and Other Cultural Issues

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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greetings welcome to the dividing line i was just diving into exactly what i wanted to get into in the uh in the wilson dissertation right as stuff started and so now you have to put that off man i almost feel like saying hey just put this up on the screen let's just read this all together and but that way we can't do that we've got uh we've got other things to be uh to be doing but uh anyway i wanted to start off uh the program today our fourth program of this week with um someone i think it was toby logston on on twitter had uh made a statement in fact i i think i could probably since it's it would be in my tweets and replies um um had uh basically made the statement that there is there's going to be a lot of thinking to be doing uh in regards yeah okay here it is found it two hours ago uh toby and the lockdown logs um one of the things we should probably be discussing how to treat a fellow christian disagrees to your opinion about when churches should reopen you would think that this is a salvation issue for some people to which i had said top topic on the dividing line in just over two hours and that was not because of his having said that that was uh that was planned uh ahead of time i think i had mentioned that elsewhere um so it you know here in uh in arizona very disappointed that the governor extended things out into the middle of may um a lot of negative things going on there's going to be stop start stuff there's going to be i predict all sorts of less than accurate media shenanigans as far as numbers and everything else are concerned to attempt to extend out the lockdowns as far as as far as humanly possible as close to the elections as possible do the most damage as possible that aside people can disagree about things like that i think the evidence is overwhelming and will become more overwhelming over time uh but the reality is that what we're going to be seeing now will be churches in some states that are open churches in other states that are not so you're going to have across denominational lines there's going to be people that are still stuck online there will be some churches quite honestly that will not have celebrated the supper for months pretty soon and for a lot of churches that's not a big deal for other churches that's an extremely big deal and it should be a central aspect of our consideration i'm hoping that i'd like to see some positive things come out of all of this and i'm hoping that one of those positive things will be a significantly increased appreciation uh for the nature of the supper and its importance it's ironic that i had preached three or four maybe five sermons on that very subject um not too many months ago and so but the point is that eventually i i i i'm going to go ahead and say eventually this will be behind us i i do not think we will ever get past the results of this i think there has been a fundamental changing of direction in our culture um i think there's been a fundamental change of direction in the relationship of church and state in the united states i think that was already happening this is just simply turn the light on um we have been in fact one of the categories on our website uh that i can click uh when i'm defining a blog article is post -evangelicalism that's a phrase we've been using for a long time to discuss to identify the fact that we live in a post -evangelical age we live in a society that's laws and institutions are still marked by the existence of a conservative christian faith but the vast majority of people in that society no longer embrace that faith that's that's just a reality that's not really something that can be can be debated that's just the case and um so as a result i i think that some of these changes didn't just happen overnight they had already happened but this is what sort of blew the dust off so we can now see what was going on or whatever other analogy or terminology you wish to try to utilize in that situation and so um what we're going to be having to deal with um once this once we get to a place where we can maybe gather again um in large groups i mean what how amazing would it be if you've seen the last southern baptist convention you've seen the last meeting of together for the gospel or or ligonier or whatever uh the last mass thousands of people in the same room type stuff wouldn't that be amazing um but i'm not saying that that's what i foresee but i i could see it happening i i could see a a constant cycle of panic on the part of people and i could i definitely think that probably forever uh now we're going to see a lot of people in face masks no matter where they are i just got an email from american airlines if you're going to fly american or delta or anybody else you're going to be wearing face masks from now on and i've read a lot of stuff that says that's the exact opposite of what you should be doing but that's that's not the issue right now the point is things have changed and let's say we get to a point where we can sit around and actually talk about this there have been some fractures uh that have been either uncovered created or made larger um that pre -existed all of this but now they're there and this has been seen primarily in regards to the differing attitudes of churches in regards to requests and mandates from the state so in some places the state has requested initially it was no meetings larger than 50 people then it was no meetings larger than 10 people then it was meetings at all initially it was um you know just wash your hands everything will be fine and now it's hide in the basement alone um a lot has changed and keeps changing and morphing but initially these were requests and there was a lot of people including myself asking okay what is what can be legally mandated but then there was obviously in every single eldership um well okay in churches with elders um and between the ears of churches that have single pastor paradigms or in deacon groups for those that have that form of church governance there were the all the questions concerning um what should we do um and immediately i mean i would say within the i would say the first phraseology that was used within the church was we need to love our neighbor and there was initially no discussion of what that meant it was just automatically well you love your neighbor by shutting down your church because it's going to be an act of of hatred toward your neighbor to spread the virus to let the curve spike um this was the paradigm that was being promoted still being promoted still being believed i think by the vast majority of people there were no classes when i was in seminary about this okay this was this was not um a a vital topic of discussion in seminary um i i'm sure somebody somewhere had done a breakout session at some point uh talking about this kind of stuff um but i i missed that one and so the church as a whole in the united states and around the world was given very little time there was very little opportunity for any type of major consultation or discussion add to this the reality that one's understanding of the relationship of church and state is central to how you're going to process these requests and the range of possible responses my understanding for example is that you know certain large theological institutions churches the governor of the state himself called and what do you do if you are the pastor or the president the pastor of a large church the president of the theological seminary and the governor of your state calls you and says um the best information we have is that this could kill millions of people because there was a study out of the royal college of medicine it was it will forever i think be known as the panicsville study but that's what freaked everybody out once that came out pretty much all the governments just simply fell in line the models that it predicted have proven to be off by factors of of many factors um but that's what freaked everybody else out and so you're the pastor of a church the governor's on the phone and says if you would shut down and remember back then it was for a few weeks it was just for a few weeks uh if you would go to online stuff or if you you're doing that would greatly encourage others to do that would you please help me in this way what are you gonna do um i don't know of almost anybody i suppose there were people i just don't know who they were but i don't know of almost anybody that had a written statement where they had thought through all of this beforehand and had given consideration to the relationship of church and state the importance of worship what is what is missing in online worship versus in -person worship um how long can one substitute for the other what about the lord's supper what about baptism what about face -to -face fellowship of the saints um all of these things unfortunately for many evangelical churches were separate convictions that had never been challenged as to how they relate to one another and certainly in america where many churches have flags on the um on the would call it stage diaz whatever some fundamentalists put entire bunting around the but see i've been noticing that and it's like what uh around the uh platform or around the the pulpit and stuff like that certainly in those types of a context when that state is asking you to do x y or z well it's my patriotic duty to to do what i'm asked to do and to save lives and love your neighbor and and so on and so forth different churches responded differently and obviously one of the biggest issues that we're facing now is that within churches there were differences of opinion and one thing we do not need to see is our new denominational alignments further further fracturing everybody now based upon um do gather don't gather theology um you know and that's happened in the past church history that similar things have happened where you've you've had disruptions that resulted in entire denominational identifying markers that 100 years later nobody understands but it happened we don't need that now i can guarantee you that so what do we do well first thing when this whole thing started one of the first things that i mentioned on this program was the first big controversy was hebrews 10 25 demands that we meet on a weekly basis on sunday and therefore we have to do this and if you don't you're a sinner and i specifically on this program said i would have a really hard time defending that um hebrews 10 25 is actually about people who were purposefully um avoiding the gathering of the saints they were not submitting themselves to those who had the rulership over them same terminology also used by the author to the hebrews lots of people like that that have a real problem with the idea of authority in the church of an authority found in the structure of the church in the ministry of the word in the church um a lot of them have had bad experiences with people who abused authority and things like that which we won't get into right now but the point is um hebrews 10 25 is addressed to the people who are refusing uh to engage um with apostolic command to be a part of the body they're out under a tree with their partial bible someplace and they think that's good enough it is difficult to extend that out to an argument that demands um that even if um there is a if you're living let's let's go the other direction if you were living in a german city in late 1944 as a christian would hebrews 10 25 have demanded that you were to take you and your children to a central location for a church service during allied bombing raids um no obviously not um that that would be a situation where one bomb could take everybody out one shot we didn't have guided bombs back then it was carpet bombing and it was a horrible thing and look at what happened in places like dresden and other places um it was mass murder um and so no there's an obvious instance where you don't take hebrews 10 25 to mean that you have that kind of a mandate however it does say that there is a regular meeting of the church and it does say do not absent yourself from it so that's an address individuals who are in danger of not being in submission to what the church does the church can take a a precept from that and we should obviously the apostolic example is regular meeting the singing of hymns psalms hymns and spiritual songs prayers the reading of scripture and the preaching of the word that's that's the apostolic example and down through history christians have longed for that community that worship so much so that to be excluded from it was a terrible horrible thing obviously that's one of the issues we're dealing with today is exclusion from that many people today would not consider to be a terrible horrible thing at all that's one of the major differences but i pled for a balanced understanding at the very beginning because there were people on the one side saying all of you who have gone online you're just sinning and it wasn't real big at first but it has now become in my opinion the predominant theological conclusion across the board liberals and conservatives is that the appropriate theological conclusion was you stop meeting you that this is the mechanism whereby you love neighbor and we're going to show the world we love our neighbors by submitting to these requests from the state and if you don't you are bad indefensible and probably should not be allowed back into any type of denominational fellowship or anything else um on the other side of this so and then i think there's been a lot of people in the middle that have said look we're doing the best we can um a lot of our churches are made up of you know a congregation has mainly elderly folks it's probably going to look at this in a way different than a congregation with mainly younger folks at least this particular instance next virus comes along kills all kids it's going to reverse right um but i think there's a lot of people in the middle that are uncomfortable with either of the extremes doesn't make the middle the safe place but i just think a lot of folks are like i don't know we've never debated this before i've never seen it seen a debate on it i've never seen books on it we just weren't really prepared for this and so what do we do now is there room to get together and say okay this was our experience um let's look at let's look at the numbers let's see how many churches are now dead uh let's see how many churches are going to fundamentally alter how they meet how they worship what the nature of worship is in the future because of this um there is room for discussions within the body concerning whether that was wise or not wise uh but can that be done here's and here's the problem almost none of this can be discussed right now without a massive amount of emotion and i've already gotten into a lot of trouble because i am not a person who thinks emotionally i'm a scotsman okay it's just not i'm not saying necessarily that people in scotland today because they are doing that but us old time folks this is not how we function um and so i'm not even sure when that's going to be a possibility but when it gets there now i'm in an unusual a very sometimes precarious i think it's a blessing but it's a challenge at the same time i'm in an unusual situation um i sit here regularly we have a very large audience and we are thankful for that and we are thankful for all of you who have stood with us during this time and continue to make this a possibility we've done our best to pump out the material for you and to give you not something that's a distraction hopefully something of great value on the level of church history and theology and everything else um but i live in multiple worlds i'm also a pastor of a church and i did not expect to be in the position of eldership at this church um at apologia church but i am um when we went there that was not what i was looking for but very quickly i was functioning in that way i was involved in situations where i had been past pastoring and elder in a church for over two decades and so you you have to follow what the lord provides and so there i am and that puts me in two different worlds and i try to do the best with that and in this situation um our fellowship kept meeting while the vast majority did not and when we listened to what the governor of our state said uh we did not hear any demands that we were to stop meeting uh in fact we saw rather clearly that constitutionally protected uh behaviors and activities um could continue even though there was the request well so we we made modifications um if you saw us meet in december of last year you would have seen lots of hugging and handshaking and um and everything else uh that you know would be natural in that type of a situation um at the end of the service the last song we sing the song leader invites people to come forward so there's sort of a group develops down front and there is a song and then there's a singing of um the benediction uh the doxology we sing the doxology together um and then there is the giving of the benediction and normally myself or jeff uh are the ones who give that uh that benediction and everybody would be close bye etc etc well so we've we've had to change a few things and so uh we're not we're not shaking hands um and we but but and here's here's the issue um how do you deal with the lord's supper because i have let me see here um where did i put this um you have knoxville and knoxville county are allowing churches to open up real small but one of the things they specifically say is no lord's supper no what you can't have you the church the the state is telling a church if you want to open you can but we get to define what kind of worship you do and in germany and they're considerably more authoritative even there um in germany same thing no supper so as elders we had to go okay what do we how are we going to handle this and so we made some changes and uh our tradition is to partake of the lord's supper in every service every sunday we have lord's supper we also come forward to receive the lord's supper we come take it you don't have you know i i don't even know how you would handle the passing of one common thing up and down rows that's that that's tough that i i get it uh we don't do it that way anyways so what we've done is you go to the back we have two tables down front this is something i normally do don't always but i'm normally one of the elders that since we started doing it this way you have uh the wine and the cups and then we spread the bread out in a much larger thing than we've ever used before so that you can grab a single piece now it's it's unleavened bread so you know like a matzah um but you can you don't have to be rummaging through everybody else's to get your own in other words so we made changes and so when you go to the back and you get in line then some of the other elders and deacons are back there and i don't know if any of them invested in hand sanitizer when this all started but it would have been wise if they had uh but we've got the big old honking bottles of hand sanitizer and everybody gets in line gets squirted not forcibly in the set but you get get to do your thing uh before you know there's this we have elders believe me zach and luke are big enough that no one's gonna mess with zach and luke i mean we called luke the bear for a reason zach's not much smaller than luke is um so you're not gonna argue with these guys so uh they get your hands nice and clean and you come down you get your bread and your wine um and then you go back from from the sides and so that's how we've been doing it uh we've been doing this at two different locations the location we were at when this all started stopped meeting and about two weeks later told us that we had to as well uh that we are no longer welcome there and because we rent facilities we don't have our own building which is a little bit of a challenge we're not not that small of a church but anyway and so uh when if you've been watching uh apology of services on uh on facebook or something like that some of you have noticed there are some sounds in the background those ain't fake fake sounds and that isn't just one kid in the back of the room the sound guy um there's a there's 200 people sitting there and that includes kids not as many kids we have folks who aren't coming and we have not there is no recrimination there is no putting these people down we have older members who who have voluntarily absented themselves with our permission you don't want someone coming who does not want to be there i'm sure they're looking forward to the opportunity of being able to come in the future in a in a way where there's not any you know concern but yeah we thought it through we thought well you know what what can we do uh that will allow us to continue to have our convictions as to what we believe needs to be done but also to recognize the reality of what's happening and i think we have a whole lot better grasp of the numbers now than we have in the past i still think it's going to be well i don't know if we'll ever have really accurate numbers to be honest with you but i think eventually six months a year from now we might have a little bit better numbers to be able to to go better but you you don't have those at the start you're getting all sorts of conflicting information and so there had to be a decision made weighing what you believe is necessary for the church to continue and the reality is that people can watch you talking on a screen like you're watching me right now but i can't see you and i cannot see your response and i cannot see when what i'm saying is resonating with you and i cannot have a conversation with you afterwards and be able to tell by the way your eyes are looking as to whether you're struggling with something or not that's just that's just the way things are and so what are we going to do when we get together two months from now three months from now four months from now and we ask the question okay we're all meeting again but the fall is coming winter is coming and what if there is a second way what if there's a mutation what if there's something else um i'm predicting an october surprise i think there's going to be an october surprise how could there not be this is 2020 i mean think about every month so far this year how could there not be an october surprise there's been a surprise every other month that would make october the only normal month and i ain't gonna happen no no what it's gonna be huge it's gonna be huge it's whatever it's gonna be huge that's right um we may want to take a breath and just go could we just take a vacay now we don't have time to because i truly believe that especially certain quarters of the political sphere have tasted blood and they love it and they're gonna use this because you gotta understand statists the greatest danger to a statist is a person who is dedicated to one true god so you look at china and who is china going after notice i did not say just christians because you need you need to understand this china's going after the christians and the muslims because both of them say you ain't god and you don't represent god gg ping um so so statists don't like monotheistic religion because it obviously means that if the state will put into practice meaningful morality and ethics based upon the equivalency of the 10 commandments and god's moral law will be the best citizens you'll ever have but that's not what state wants the state always wants more power it always you know winston has to sit in the cafe at the end and say i love big brother wants your worship wants your wants your your whole heart i'll kill you once he gets you but but that's what's got to happen and that's not going to happen with christianity and so we have to think this through and we have to i would highly suggest something along the lines of a letter to caesar a letter to caesar a statement to the governing authorities as to where their authority is derived from and where it ends and that the church of jesus christ drives its authority from him and him alone and that therefore there are certain aspects of this life that they have no authority over they have no authority to tell us how to worship they have no authority to tell us that we cannot sing for example now does that mean we should ignore risks no but the fact of the matter is folks every time any christian from the days of the apostles has opened his or her mouth to sing there was a risk it's almost like we we've decided that oh this is a brand new thing it only started in 2020 all of this was life was risk -free until 2020 no that's not the case and you could make a very strong argument a very strong argument based upon some of what is being said today that the very fact that the church gathered over the course of centuries was irresponsible for the church irresponsible because life has always been risky and countless people have died because they went to church that's a reality that's a fact you can close your eyes to it you can close your ears to it you cannot not want to think about it that's a fact and in fact living life without risk is not living life that's that's the way god made this world he is in control of when we leave it and so the i think we churches as a whole really need to be thinking through where we take the stand we don't want to take the stand with these independent fundamentalist baptists who are simply poking their eye their finger in the eye of the state because they like poking their finger in the eye of everybody that's just because they're irascible it's because they like to be mean -spirited it's because they like to hear themselves screaming and jumping up and down or doing whatever else they're doing we we don't want to be them we don't want to act like them we don't want to embrace that kind of a perspective that kind of a worldview excuse the rather loud piece of equipment going by outside repeatedly but how do we differentiate ourselves well we have to have a principled biblical understanding of the rights of the church and the fact that any government this is what was so beautiful about that letter that the chinese pastors sent to the government two years ago most of whom are now in prison um that that basically said you know if you would if you would do what you say you're going to do we'd be the best citizens that you would have because we have no interest in engaging in criminal activity or doing anything else but the fact of matter is you're under the lordship of christ and you need to repent because he's king of kings and lord of lords and that of course abject heresy in the ccp that's that that that is that is committing heresy in that culture and we need to know look how many churches ran face first into covet 19 and had never ever thought seriously about how to put together in a consistent way a christian worldview that that takes seriously the lordship of christ the authority of the church the nature of the ordinances of the church the sacraments of the church the importance of those things why we meet what is central what is definitional of worship oh wow there was a huge black hole that remains a big black hole um we ran into this without ever having been forced to cram all this into one consistent thing and my hope and prayer is that out of this will come a great deal more consistency as we talk with one another about these things and as we recognize where our differences are and realize that for a lot of us the differences are simply because we've just not thought about it before we've never been forced to now the only way that we can really do that and have all the voices at the table is if we don't do recrimination for what has happened in the past and so my fellow elders will tell you one of the first things i said the first couple weeks this was going on was what however we do this we've got to do it in such a way that at least as far as it relies upon us we are not by continuing to meet saying to everybody else you guys are lesser than us you you you don't we do we do not honor your eldership we don't honor you no we've got to make sure that as far as it relies upon us here's the problem it only lies upon us so so far when people see that there have been churches and there are a few not many and there are some some states i don't know that there can be any because you have uh rather authoritarian structures in in place um but the fact is when people see churches that have continued to meet all the way through this faithfully that that's taken as well you must be saying all the rest of us are lesser than you even when you don't say that even when you've avoided attempting to give any kind of indication of that whatsoever the i think that those of us who have continued to meet can learn from those who did not and i'd like to think that those that did not could learn from those of us who did to understand why we felt those things were that important to continue to do despite the request of the government not to and the eventual creation of a not not a theological consensus that was derived out of scholarly articles and reflection everything else it's just well we all ended up in this position so it must have been the right thing to do well that doesn't make it the right thing to do so as we move forward can we move forward can we move forward together um i think denominations are going to have to try to develop some type of consistent theological understanding of what worship is what the local church is things like that but a lot of this does require i think some fundamental examination of some foundational issues that the american evangelical church has taken for granted has adopted traditions that are not really consistently biblical at all um and so where you know where we go from here is really is really the question i hope we have the opportunity to really think these things through um i don't know how much time before the next crisis because what i'm seeing is we can't do it through the legislature we can't do it through the courts we'll do it through crisis we'll do it through crisis uh we will lasso this culture and we will drag it into techno totalitarianism you've seen i think it was bulgaria or romania bulgaria i think and south korea is doing the same thing wristbands gps tracking wristbands uh so in south korea weren't not allowed not allowed leave your house and so what would people do if they needed to or wanted to they'd leave their cell phones behind and so the government's like oh you leave your cell phone behind we'll put a permanent tracker on you wow i mean so and and early on i said your papers please and this is going to be your papers i did i'm not trying to say oh i'm not that should have been obvious it should have been obvious for years hindsight's 2020 um so since crises are so very effective can you imagine can you imagine in november of last year if someone had come along and had said look uh we would like 40 million americans to give up their jobs and we would like a whole percentage of the nation's retail restaurants go out of business and we would like to disrupt the food chain and we would like to threaten the continued existence of a large portion of the hospital system so that the rest of it has to be socialized and we just we would like you all to do this voluntarily voluntarily how successful would that have been yeah right now we have the lowest unemployment in years but we want to jack it up past the depression uh and do all this other stuff to you but we want you to do it to yourself who could have imagined we did it to ourselves we did it to ourselves you you can talk about putting the noose around the neck you can talk about putting your head on the guillotine you talk about getting the shotgun out whatever you want to do it was a self -inflicted decapitation that's what it was so that worked that worked really well so do you really think they're just going to stop now and go okay we got a lot out of that one let's let that one rest for a while no no there's more coming there's more coming and once it starts becoming a drum beat by then it's too late uh we you know then we'll sort of get used to it but the damage will be done but for the church we only have some certain amount of time to think these things through try to get consistent and what if we come to different conclusions can we still identify others as brothers and sisters if we end up in a different place here i mean i'd be really i don't know but i would be really interested in knowing what the situation in um china is in regards to the relationships of different kinds of churches the churches that refuse any type of state sanction versus the churches that have some level of state sanction versus the fully state sanctioned churches what's the relationship between those people i don't know should have should i don't try to find out i suppose um but that's sort of one one direction we could look uh i've mentioned in some of my articles which will eventually be winston will get rid of them um winston will will make sure that none of those articles exist yeah winston will rewrite them that's right that's i forgot winston will actually have me promoting uh submission to big brother uh so when i've talked about big brother they'll actually turn into oh yes i love big brother big brother is wonderful and and i want to have a wristband and ankle band implanted electronics and everything else yeah that's that's what i want to do that's that's what it'll be uh eventually if things go the direction that they're going okay you've got the the mic up so i suppose uh the be careful i am going to be careful and i'm going to be sober i think as um some of the folks that we've talked to in the last 24 hours the the issues of the slings and arrows from within the body going both directions we need that needs to come to a stop and and however our convictions are however we feel about this there are things on the immediate horizon uh that i think we need to really suddenly wrap our arms around we need to consider the question of things that the kinds of things that started things like the salvation army we we i know i'm a little off the normal path here yeah you're not seeing where i'm coming from here but the idea here that we we believe that we're going to have neighbors who are going to be on very hard times very soon well yeah and i'm mindful of the fact that many of those pictures that we look at from the depression with the soup lines are out in front of churches oh yeah and i don't see us prepared for anything like that none of our churches really um we've dealt with homeless in our cities for a long long time and we've kind of you know donated to uh food banks or donated to homeless shelters etc but i i see something very different coming than what we've seen anything is normal and then you put what you're talking about on the horizon and you look at that and go okay what about phase two how will we deal with phase two and if we don't get our minds right about all of this in we're going to be right back at square one flat -footed not knowing what to do or everybody going their own different directions and then shooting arrows back at each other again and and well i'm not sure i i would like to have greater um confidence in the non -arrow shooting part but um well one being one of the primary targets of those arrows one such suggestion that was posed to me yesterday was the idea of something like the statement on social justice where right a formal statement is formulated that getting that wording uh put down it's going to be interesting yeah i i'm not yeah uh my gut feeling is as i said a letter to caesar would be great i'm just the the the divisions are going to unfortunately make that difficult to do um my hope would be that thinking that these things through might create more unanimity but there's still some foundational issues that i think would make that pretty difficult but there there definitely needs to be um a statement made either by individual churches or groups of churches uh to caesar uh in regards to and this i think may have been this is something i wish had happened when the shutdowns did start was saying to caesar we will voluntarily do so for such amount of for such and such amount of time for these reasons but you need to understand that um that there are spheres of authority here and that we are not capitulating to your taking over our sphere of authority yeah cooperation is not capitulation right and the problem the problem there is a lot of people do not have an ecclesiology where the church has an right uh there is such a weak ecclesiology in protestant evangelicalism as a whole uh that it's pretty tough to talk about the church as the bride of christ representing his authority actually has authority over these areas right um so yeah i'm i'm i'm thinking about when when you started off you referred back to that program where you discussed this that was on march 17th and you started thinking that's six weeks ago yeah so much has happened since then i feel like i'm in a whole nother world already no that was so long ago yeah and when i went back and watched that just yesterday i'm thinking wow there was just so much we didn't even know we were what was going to happen in the next four to six weeks no idea and we need to recognize that we're still in that same spot we really are we have just learned a little bit as to what caesar really can do well what caesar is going to attempt to get us accustomed to him doing um that really is that really is the issue folks so um so yeah um things to think about things to pray about um i do not claim to have all the answers um but i can tell you this um the church that has no commitment to the reality that her reason for existence includes that special time of worship and the fact that we think it's this is this is really where one of the problems is we think that worship is the music part the worship is the authoritative proclamation of god's truth that then conforms the people of god to the image of jesus christ and brings conviction to sinners makes known god's truth in this world this is how he's worshiped we are showing our submission to god by being a part of that proclamation by sitting there we are saying i believe this is true i believe this word comes from god and that is my highest authority that's what the state fears and when we replace that's when we replace the proclamation with the music the music's wonderful the music's great i love having the music the music lifts my heart i i we we had i think i played for you um on apology radio when summer was on and my grandkids were there and so they came in at the end and did i play it or did i not play it i don't know if i did um but they had janny the youngest um saying the doxology and we we've made reference in fact we we print the doxology now in the bulletin because not every not everybody walks in has a christian background you know i mean those what's been in the church i mean was there ever a day i didn't know the doxology not that i remember it's just been a part but you've got to realize that's not not the usual way well uh we we put it in the thing but jeff was talking about it a couple weeks ago and he says if you have any questions ask janny and i sort of looked at janny's with me and looked at janny she's like yeah i got it we're good you know and uh uh so uh that's all one wonderful and great and and it's a part of the worship yes but one of the biggest things that the church has missed has been the replacement of the authoritative proclamation of god's truth as the act of worship with singing singing supports that everything else but the reality is what we believe is when god's word is being handled and opened and proclaimed with authority when it's been exegeted properly you can say thus saith the lord if you don't do exegesis you cannot say honestly thus saith the lord but when you do it you can say this is what the lord says and that is authoritative not only for those who submit to him it's authoritative for those who don't and that's why china hates it and that's why the leftists hate it and that's why they will try to stamp it out and that's why it is happening in in back rooms in china and in other places in the world and it may be happening in that way here too which means each local church needs to be thinking about what happens when the state says okay that's it we can't let you meet it all anymore it's just too dangerous now that danger could be covid 21 that danger could be a a bacteria we've never heard of before that danger could be the danger you represent to the state's best interests as it is in china north korea and other places and as is coming to us at a rapid pace of incredible pace speed so what you gonna do then hero have you started thinking through how where or do you just give up and the real challenge here is with technological advancement it is so much easier to follow people it's so much easier to follow people and so we pray when we pray god deliver us from evil men and women when we pray that prayer we are recognizing god has the power to do so so if he does not it is his judgment it is his judgment and given that our our nation in the united states and the vast majority of other nations in the world has blood all over its hands from the murder of our own children we can hardly sit there and go oh he wouldn't do that why not we've used our freedom to murder our children why shouldn't he take it away so um okay well nothing like taking up the first hour on that um of course rich had to get in there if you notice rich is talking a whole lot more than he used to his um i think it's because the rich cam and um and stuff like that you know um and playing with the with the things like that stuff like that let's switch gears um this arrived today thankfully i'm waiting for this to come i saw this i think peter gurry uh um posted this uh it's called the vaticanus bible i guess it's from koine greek so these are guys that you know they're sort of part of the you need to pronounce it in a certain way thing which i think is silly but but they're putting out some interesting stuff and you sort of buy it and i guess it's sort of on demand type thing um type of situation um but this is from the vatican manuscript uh codex vaticanus which of course king james only if you were like terrible um but um uh i'll show you how it looks here let me let me find um they they put the name up in the up in the corner so here's luke and here's katha yowane and here's here's so what's neat about it is it goes column by column and then out in the in the margins you have the verse reference so here's here's one one up here so here's the here's the beginning uh up here and nice big print and what that allows you to do is to really learn to read magiscule or unseal greek text the vast majority of seminary graduates who have read the nessie island or the ubs cannot read this it's it's all it's all it's the full unsealed text exactly what you have in in vaticanus but it's done well if you if you go to what's on my screen i have vaticanus i have vaticanus up right now um and so i'll just you know there it is right there and so here's john one one here's the beginning uh right there this is only the gospels by the way it's only matthew mark luke and joe but there you see what vaticanus looks like but it's going to be three columns wide so this maps to each column so you can find where you are in vaticanus but it's just one per page um so i think it's really well done it's very readable and obviously if you can learn the discipline of reading unseal then sinaticus vaticanus the papyri uh the papyri sometimes it's just the more ancient form and and the what they're writing on these are written on vellum these are written on parchment so nice and even and beautiful now vaticanus i've mentioned this before i think sinaticus is a much prettier manuscript uh but vaticanus um some poor monk did something really really wrong and as penance he had to rewrite the entire manuscript so in words he had to go back because it was fading he had to go back and retrace every letter and remember this is the entire bible from genesis to vaticanus ends at hebrews 9 14 the last part of it fell off but anyway um but so so there's it's actually easier to read this than it is to read the online stuff from the vatican library because i was showing you genesis 50 i think yesterday from vaticanus and you can see there's it was very uneven as far as the um lettering and stuff like that because of you know ravages of age it's rather old um but this is gonna be really neat if you're into like text criticism stuff like that small suggestion uh doing like some devotional reading uh in something like this would really really help you in your examination of papyri and things like that it would it would really help um you're killing two birds with one stone you can read from mark you can contemplate the meaning but you're also getting used to reading that that form of text which which would allow you to read across you know basically up to the 10th century when that's that's when they switched over to minuscule text which is what you be more like what you would have in your nestle island and united bible society text or your tr for that matter but the gospels are available i'll try to see if i can find it's coining coining greek .com

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so just like coining greek .com .com and you can purchase it and i like the cover uh and there you go so thought i'd let you know about that that's a neat thing to be able to uh to access and have uh have there um a couple things on the cultural level this morning i saw a series of tweets from a guy named benjamin perry faithfully bp and he's got a backwards collar on stuff which means nothing he's a homosexual advocate and you'll probably be seeing some of his some of this series repeated in various places parents be aware some stuff about homosexuality is about to come up but he says in his fourth tweet the truth is jesus and his disciples ministry is no less holy if they occasionally had sex with one another or if he had relationships with the beloved disciple and mary magdalene because remember it's lgbtq there's a bunch of stuff there's a lot of perversity in there or if they expressed affection that fell somewhere between sex and platonic affection what if jesus cuddled peter on a cold lonely night this is these are these are people who are viewed as ministers not only in our society and allowed to utilize that type of terminology but the state sees these people and realizes how tremendously useful they are they're tremendously useful up to a point once the state has the power at once they get rid of them to throw them to the side but these kinds of apostates these kinds of of sexually perverted theological heretics utilize the context that we have today to promote this kind of thing and most christians have no earthly idea of how to respond to this type of thing other than just with utter shock other other shock that anyone could be so bold and yet this stuff has been around for a number of decades now i remember back in 2011 when i read michael brown's book a queer thing happened to america and there was a chapter about gay theology and he said i hate to write this but you need to know what's out there and this is the same now it's on twitter back then it was in particular books that were not widely read now it's on twitter that's nine years and for some people nine years is a long period of time culturally and historically it's not a long period of time at all and so this uh this kind of you know and and these are churches so when you when you hear these types of churches making statements the world is confused but the world wants to hear that kind of thing they want the open -mindedness of that kind of thing um but they also know in their heart of hearts that that kind of church really isn't a church doesn't really believe anything because they actually believe just like we do they don't have a divine revelation there's nothing there's nothing there and there isn't uh but if you call something like that heresy there there you go um where did that thing go oh i know where it is i i think i can find it um anderson cooper wrote the following i want to share with you some joyful news on monday i became a father this is wyatt cooper he is three days old he is named after my father who died when i was 10 i hope and be i can be as good a dad as he was my son's middle name is morgan it's a family name on my mom's side i know my mom and dad liked the name morgan because i recently found a list they made 52 years ago when they were trying to think of names for me wyatt morgan cooper my son he was 7 .2